5 Tricks for Twitter Power Users

Jeff Haden learned much of what he knows about business and technology as he worked his way up in the manufacturing industry. Everything else he picks up from ghostwriting books for some of the smartest leaders he knows in business.

If you love Twitter—and you also have a life—you probably use Buffer to schedule your tweets: To make announcements at a specific time, to send time-sensitive tweets like for limited-time offers, to communicate when your followers are most likely to notice, and to avoid membership in the tweet-a-minute club.

If that’s you then you'll want to check out a few ways to make Buffer even more useful. Who better to provide tips than Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer.

Here are five tricks he recommends:

1. Use SocialBro. SocialBro provides a wide range of features: You can see which users are online, monitor a specific group of users via a Twitter list, monitor search terms… in short, find out more about who is tweeting right now. Now a SocialBro algorithm determines when most of your followers are online to see your tweets; a couple clicks later and you can set those times within Buffer. Better timing can boost click-through rates up to 200 percent, says Widrich. "SocialBro's algorithm optmizes this even further."

2. Schedule retweets. Install Buffer with the appropriate browser extension and in addition to “Reply,” Retweet,” and “Favorite” options, you also get a “Buffer” option. That lets you schedule a retweet with the original “RT” signifier. That way you can schedule retweets within Twitter.

“This is a great way to engage with your followers when you have only very limited time at hand," Widrich says. "I browse my stream for 10 minutes every morning. Every great tweet I see I add to my Buffer as a retweet. A lot of the people I retweeted reply, thank me, follow me, and start retweeting my content. “

3. Use ifftt. Iftt (if this then that) connects two Web services together. Say you take Instagram photos and you want them to go out as tweets. Take a lot of photos in a short period of time and you’ll machine-gun your tweets. By using iftt you can connect Instagram to a scheduling tool (like Buffer) and space your tweets out over a period of time. iftt can connect with Evernote, Flickr, Foursquare, Google Reader, texts… and add those items to your Buffer immediately.

4. Use Tweetings. Buffer recently worked with Tweetings to allow users to schedule retweets from within the Tweetings iOS interface. Integrations with other Twitter apps are in the pipeline too, now that Buffer's API is open to any app developer.

5. Add a Buffer button to blogs. “This is a great way for visitors to share more content from your blog—and stay on your blog longer—without flooding their Twitter stream with too many updates at once."